Angelina Jolie on Playing Maleficent: "My Kids Were Scared Of Me!"

No matter how convincing her costume and makeup are, we know that Angelina Jolie isn’t really Maleficent… but her kids? They’re not so sure.

“When Pax saw me for the first time, he ran away and got upset — and I thought he was kidding, so I was pretending to chase him until I actually found him crying,” Angelina revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, where she takes on the cover in her very scary costume. “I had to take off pieces [of the makeup] in front of him to show him it was all fake and not freak out so much.”

But fortunately for Angie’s 5-year-old daughter, Vivienne, this meant that she got to be the one who was cast as the young Princess Aurora in the film — because she was the only one who wasn’t totally terrified of Mom in costume!

“It had to be a child that liked me and wasn’t afraid of my horns and my eyes and my claws,” the 38-year-old actress explained. “So it had to be Viv.”

And as for the rest of the kids? Angelina had to gather up Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, and Knox, and give them a little sneak peek of what the movie’s all about — showing Maleficent’s side of the story, which makes her more human and less villain.

“I said, ‘Let me tell you the real story but you can’t tell anybody,’” Angelina said. “So this was my test too, like any parent. The next day, I heard Shiloh getting into a fight with another kid, defending Maleficent, saying, ‘You don’t understand her!’ They got into a bit of an argument and I thought, that’s the reason to do the film.”

And if nothing else, it means Angelina’s kids actually listen to her — a true feat for any mom. And they were so convinced by the story she told them that Pax and Zahara actually agreed to appear in the film in the scene where Maleficent places her curse on baby Aurora.

“I had to walk by them being very mean,” Angelina said. “Of course, I wanted to stop and wink at them.”